Are you reading your Bible wrong?

In the church that I grew up in, one of the devotional tools made available every month was the little booklet entitled Our Daily Bread. Maybe you are familiar with it? These booklets were printed monthly and had a devotional for each day of the month. They contained a short scripture passage of the day, an illustration based on that passage, and then an application or encouragement that could apply in your life. It was a quick, digestible snippet for anyone with a busy schedule. I find it very helpful even to this day.

This type of devotional rhythm is widespread in our Western culture. We are used to reading God’s Word a chapter or two at a time, analyzing what happens in that chapter, and looking for clues to apply it to our lives in some way. There is nothing inherently wrong with meditating on God’s Word in small bites, but we may be in danger of missing the main course.

This became evident to me when I took a group up to Minneapolis to visit a ministry called Engage Global. There, for the first time, the group was introduced to the concept of looking at the Bible as a single narrative. In our first session, the speaker challenged the idea of how we compartmentalize biblical stories without considering God’s overarching narrative. With this approach, the stories become about us and our lives, rather than about God and his plan. During the evening discussion about that session, one person from our group commented, “I feel like I have been reading my Bible all wrong!” It was a bold admission for that individual and a reality check for me that this lack of understanding is the case for many of us.

For me, it was a slow, gradual process to fully understand this realization. It required studying God’s Word, listening to sermons, and even looking at Our Daily Bread and asking the question, “How does this fit into God’s metanarrative, into the overarching story that He has been weaving in this world for thousands of years and that He continues to craft towards a glorious conclusion even today?”

When seen in this light, the most important thing to understand from any passage of Scripture is how it fits into God’s plan for the world, always going back to the original reason He created the universe (which will be the topic of our next article, so keep an eye out for that!).

For more on God’s metanarrative, check out this course from Access Truth.

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